Belle Wong: writer, reader, creativity junkie

Incoming! Crossed Wires, by Rosy Thornton

Incoming! is a feature at Ms. Bookish that chronicles new books that have arrived in the Ms. Bookish household. Here’s the latest new arrival:

Crossed Wires, by Rosy Thornton

About the Book:

This is the story of Mina, a girl at a Sheffield call centre, whose next customer in the queue is Peter, a Cambridge geography don, who has crashed his car into a tree stump.

Despite their differences, they’ve got a lot in common – both single, both parents, both looking for love.

Could it be that they’ve just found it?

This is a story about the small joys and tribulations of parenthood; about one-ness and two-ness; about symmetry and coincidence; about the things that separate us and the things that bring us together.

First line: ‘Autocare Direct Motor Insurance. My name is Mina, how may I help you?’

Received from: The author

My initial thoughts:

It’s funny what makes a person decide on a book sometimes. Lately I’ve really been cutting down on the number of review books I’m accepting; but in the case of Crossed Wires, I took a look at Rosy Thornton’s website and immediately thought to myself (perhaps it was that first line, “Hello, I’m Rosy and I appear to be a novelist”), I really like the way she writes.

Books and Movies, one of my favorite book blogs, recently reviewed Crossed Wires and wrote: “Thornton’s writing reminds me some of Alexander McCall Smith, although (and don’t hate me if you’re a total Smith fan) I think Ms. Thornton’s characters are more authentic, less caricature.” If I hadn’t already been sold by Thornton’s writing on her website, this would have done the trick (I enjoy McCall Smith’s writing very much).

Crossed Wires is one of the books I will be bringing with me when I go on holiday at the end of this month. This list is my “short list” of must-reads, as I’m not able to load up the van with books, as much as I would like to; I am really looking forward to reading this book while relaxing on a cool Maritimes beach.

“Books Should Be Books!” by Rosy Thornton In this tongue-in-cheek essay, Thornton talks about the mystifying distinction that is made between “Literature” and “Fiction” and offers up her own Utopian solution.

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I'm a writer, avid reader, artist-at-heart & book indexer. I blog about writing, books, art, creativity, spirituality, & the power of the imagination. Oh, and I like to write stuff about life in general, too!

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

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The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

“I didn’t write my books for posterity (not that posterity would have cared): I wrote them for myself. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t hunger for readers and fame. I never could have endured so much hard, solitary labor without the prospect of an audience. But this graveyard of dead books doesn’t unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had — the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. ” James Atlas

“It’s the simple, inspiring idea that when members of different groups — even groups that historically dislike one another — interact in meaningful ways, trust and compassion bloom naturally as a result, and prejudice falls by the wayside.”

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